The bomb that flayed Ritornello is the event in which a bomb stripped every living thing within a mile of Ritornello while leaving its structures standing. The region calls it lo de las cenizas (“the ashes”); it occurred fifteen years before the chronicle of Los Condenados.
| Type | Event |
| Chronicle | AV |
| Spanish entry | La bomba que descarnó Ritornello (Ardis Vala) |
Effects
The houses were intact. Everything organic — bodies, cloth, wood — dissociated; ceramics and metals remained, and buildings collapsed onto their vanished beams. Not even a spider survived; only shadows on the walls where people had stood. At dawn a companion saw an abandoned cart and smelled ash. The ghost of the old watchtower, at rest once its reliquary was restored, warned: the region will be cursed, because the adventurers who died heard one name: the Seekers sought their death.
The gazette had described Ritornero: safe border port, main civilized settlement, founded about three centuries ago, governed by the baron, 1,500 inhabitants, many demihuman. Fifteen hundred ghosts remain and will go on killing, toward the figure a skull-herald had named: 1,200,000. Servants of the order lost family there; one of the group’s undead lost his parents, at lunch: the object you gave in exchange was the destruction of your town.
Responsibility
The Seekers had handed the weapon to the trolls for an alliance, and the trolls used it. Kerbos Khan, sorcerer of the automatons, operated from the shadows to avoid the empire and the schools of magic; the Varumani were destroyed as cosmic punishment; Khan survived the castration of the machines and ended serving the dragons as “the troll elf”. The index entry names those responsible. The bomb was one of two. One is missing.
Chronology
Carad de Teyber dates “after the fall of Ritornello fifteen years ago”: the hiatus, two travelers who lost exactly three lustrums, the interrupted resettlement, the broken imperial road. Los Condenados thus takes place about fifteen years after the Seekers’ gesta, in the same valley, above the barrows of Helix.
See also
- The Egg of Ritornelo · The Egg and Its Counter
- The Fifteen-Year Hiatus
- Baron Argus de Ritornello — lost in time when the ashes occurred
- Decio Balmora · Lali — lost his wife in the valley
- Barrado Balacán — the region, renamed by the disaster
- Trocadero de Ritornello · Defeat of the Varumani